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Super-Frog

By Joel Lovell March 22, 2011 5:02 pmMarch 22, 2011 5:02 pm

There’s this story in Haruki Murakami’s “after the quake” (according to Jay Rubin, the book’s translator, Murakami insisted that the title be lowercase) called “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo.” The book is a collection of short stories about the psychic aftershocks of the ’95 Kobe earthquake. (Here’s a fascinating conversation between Murakami and Jonathan Lethem, plus audio of Murakami reading “Super-Frog.”) Five of the six stories are more or less straight-up realism, but “Super-Frog” is from the land of Kafka. A slightly overwhelmed and depressive banker named Katagiri comes home one day to find a huge Dostoyevsky-quoting frog in his house. The frog tells Katagiri that he needs his help defeating the monstrous Worm that’s raging beneath the streets of Tokyo. (Worm, by the way, is a version of the catfish of Japanese mythology, which my colleague Harvey Dickson wrote about.)

I searched all through my bookshelves last week trying to find “after the quake,” only to remember that I’d left it on the seat of a tow-truck several years ago, when the troubled car that I drove for a long time finally gave out for good. My wife and I waited for hours by the side of the road for a tow, and when the driver finally arrived, he explained that there had been a horrific multicar crash nearby and that he had been at the site of the crash all afternoon, trying to help. He told us several people had been killed. He had the intense stare and manic energy of a just-traumatized man, and he reached up several times to touch the photo of his daughter that dangled from the rearview mirror. I can’t recall his exact quote, of course, but at one point he said something about how weird it was that he, his “small” life (I do remember that’s the word he used to describe his life), had intersected with a tragedy like that. As he pulled our car to the place where we would leave it for scrap, he talked a lot about what he had seen, going over and over the terrible details, how strange to have just been home watching TV and now this.

In the story, Super-Frog tells Katagiri that “in all of Tokyo, with its teeming millions, there is no one else I could trust as much as you to fight by my side.” Katagiri insists that he’s a less-than-ordinary man. “I live a horrible life. … I don’t even know why I’m living.” he says. “Why should a person like me have to be the one to save Tokyo?” Super-Frog replies: “Because, Mr. Katagiri, Tokyo can only be saved by a person like you. And it’s for people like you that I am trying to save Tokyo.”

Which makes me think, all these years later, of the man on whose seat I left that book. And of the 50 Japanese workers, of course. And also about Murakami’s inspiring curiosity and respect, which is no small antidote to the news.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…